Different Strokes: Scaled Fee Structures for Self-organized Collectives
This text was first published in the research journal of Sint Lucas Antwerpen, TYPP #9 (2023).
In the summer of 2019 I was part of a collective of eleven people deep in the chaos and joy of running our temporary lesbian bar called Mothers & Daughters in the centre of Brussels.[1] During the two months of the project, we would meet once a week as a team to discuss our activities, problems and plans.[2] These meetings were, by necessity, focused on the practical urgencies of production, but in a collective comprised of intersecting perspectives and identities, deep emotional experiences surface in processes of production – and we were struggling to make space for these in our meetings. We had engaged a bar manager external to our collective that year, and we invited her to one of our meetings to try and make communication between the collective and the bar team a bit smoother. After the meeting had finished, we asked her what she thought of it, and she expressed her surprise at our lack of space for emotional sharing and proposed that we begin our meetings with ‘météo.’ This began the process of starting our meetings with the ‘weather’ (a literal translation of the French), a moment for all those who are present to share how they feel about their day, about the collective, about the meeting. It may seem like a small thing, but I think it changed our meetings in a meaningful way, because the process of ‘checking the weather’ makes a clear, prioritized space for the emotional life of each member of the collective and asks everyone present to listen to and support each other when they can.
This story became the kernel of my current research project at Sint Lucas Antwerpen. In this research, I am interested in rethinking the ways collectives work. Specifically, I focus on how artist–activist collectives with queer–feminist horizons might rethink their work methods, often inherited from their jobs, education and family, to explore alternative tools and strategies for collaboration that enable their politics to become a deep part of their collective processes. In this text, I am going to look at scaled fee systems, one specific ‘family’ of tools that I have been looking into recently. I will try to make this text as practical as possible, with the idea that you might be part of a collective interested in experimenting with it, too. A few disclaimers: This text is written by one person from the basis of collective experience and so it will by default be a partial and biased perspective. I also research within and for horizontally self-organized collectives with queer–feminist agendas, and I therefore will not cover in this text the process of transposing this tool into institutions or organizations that work with hierarchal structures. If this is something you would like to try within your hierarchal work environment, I would insist on a process of deep research and reflection to prepare a solid ground for this tool to have meaning beyond simply taking a performative function. Voilà.
A scaled fee system is a way of adjusting the amount that people are paid for their work based on need. At Mothers & Daughters, as with some other collectives I am involved with, we have some but limited financial resources, and a desire to compensate at least partially our collective financially for the work we do. This desire comes from an acknowledgement that a completely unpaid, volunteer-based team could potentially prohibit some people from participating in the collective and therefore limit the scope of voices and positions that could contribute to the project’s agenda and decision-making. It is important to mention here that a ‘fee’ is not the same as wages – within the kind of collective budgets and administrative structures I have worked with in the past, wages have not been a realistic option. And although I agree that protocols are needed to support our ability to negotiate for fair wages as artists (in particular when power imbalances are involved), scaled fees within collectives can be a way to make (more) meaningful impacts to people’s financial situations and also to make space for those who can and want to contribute their labour for less (which can also be a beautiful and important part of collective life).
Up until 2022, Mothers & Daughters would set a budget for fees and divide that amount equally between all members of the collective. This strategy has advantages: for example, it does not seek to collectively measure participation, with all the difficult interpersonal pressure that conversation could entail, and it also means budget planning and administration are simpler, keeping in mind that this work is also done by members of the collective. At the same time, equal fee distribution does not acknowledge the different effects fees could have on the lives of each member of the collective, the different levels of financial need, the ways in which the work in the collective financially disrupts the lives of each member, or the varying ways the cultural-political output of the collective advantages some members more than others (for example, I built part of a funded research project from my experiences within collective contexts). So, in 2022, Mothers & Daughters decided to experiment with distributing our collective fee budget through a scaled structure.
Image 1: By Arianna Bertolotti, 2018
Mothers & Daughters has always used a particular pricing tool for the drinks we sell at our bar. Our menu has two physical sides, both with the same drinks listed, but the ‘B-side’ is more expensive than the ‘A-side’ (see image 1). The difference is calculated every year based on the Belgian statistics published in the annually issued Global Gender Gap Report.[3] This menu tool was initiated in 2017 when our first edition happened in a bar that normally operates as a straight venue and, along with the menu, we were looking for ways to radically change the structures of the space for both our communities and the regulars who might join for the evening. When you come up to the bar to order a drink, you can choose which menu (or combination of menus) you order from. The proceeds from the price difference are donated to queer and feminist organizations or collectives of our choice – the specific recipients are never shared beforehand. In 2017 we had a special door crew who would explain the menu structure when people entered the venue in order to remove the pressure of having to explain from those working behind the bar, but when we started running our own autonomous venues from 2018, we printed a short explanation text on the menus:
This bar has a different economy than you may be used to.
There is a documented difference in wages, education, support and economic and social freedoms for many of us due to our race, gender and/or sexuality. At Mothers & Daughters we use a pricing system that tries to address this gap.
At Mothers & Daughters this pricing system is based on the documented gender gap in Belgium of 21%.
Menu A: If your wages, and access to opportunities and documented work are negatively affected by your gender, sexuality and/or race, then choose menu A. You will need to tell the bar people which menu you choose when you order.
Menu B: If you have a privileged position, that means your wages, and access to opportunities and documented work are positively affected by your gender, sexuality and/or race, then choose menu B. You will need to tell the bar people which menu you choose when you order. The surplus of menu B will be donated to an organization of our choosing.[4]
When I started researching scaled fees in July 2021, I looked at both sliding scale price systems (choosing how much you pay for a product or service, as with the above bar menu) and sliding scale fee systems. There is a cross-over in the discourse about these two systems, but I also found more published online about sliding scale price systems, potentially because I research in English, and there is a wealth of online shopping sites in North America that use these systems when they trade products. One important crossover between these two systems is the question of if and how you guide someone through the process of placing themselves on the scale, and in doing so, working out what might be the key political and material factors you want to highlight to those who engage in the process. On the one hand, articulating how much we should be paid is quite a difficult process for many of us in situations such as job contract negotiations or pay rise requests, and that difficulty does not magically disappear just because you are in a self-organized, collaborative context, in fact it might become even more complex because of a sense of collective responsibility—so having guidelines for this process might help to alleviate a bit of pressure. On the other hand, and this is reflected more in discussions around scaled pricing, but I do think it is relevant to scaled fees too, the priority with a tool like this is to actually make a meaningful difference in the distribution of often limited financial resources and access. Guidelines can help to deliver this fairly, much more than asking people to go it alone.
Image 2: By Alexis J. Cunningfolk, 2015
In her blog post about scaled pricing, ‘Sliding Scale: Why, How, and Sorting Out Who,’ economics researcher Hadassah Damien describes three ways of asking people to assess where they sit on a scale: ‘narrative’, ‘gut’, or ‘guidance’.[5] The ‘narrative’ approach could mean describing more clearly a number of different economic, class and/or social conditions, and asking people to self-select what is most relevant for them (see Image 2), or listing a series of income categories – choices that will then dictate how much we are paid or pay. The ‘gut’ approach is what we use on our menus at Mothers & Daughters: a short, general text that asks us to reflect on how privilege and inequality affect us, and to make a personal decision as to what we pay or are paid based on that reflection. To explain a ‘guidance’ approach, Damien gives an example of a complex map of prompts that combine ‘gut’ and ‘narrative’, in which we are asked to follow from left to right, hopefully emerging from the process with a position on the scale that reflects our situation (see Image 3). Within Damien’s examples and analysis, there is an explicit commitment to practices of economic justice that try to take into account factors of social position, income and political aims.
Image 3: By Hadassah Damien, 2019
Another model that is more specifically centred on scaled fee systems within the arts is the ‘Fairy Purse’ that I was introduced to by artist Martin Schick.[6] Unlike scaled pricing systems, the Fairy Purse process starts with a set budget for fees, so the scale position will dictate the proportion of the total amount of money that each person will receive when payments happen. Finding your position on the Fairy Purse scale involves ranking your rate of ‘tension’ in response to a series of employment evaluation criteria. Your rankings become points, which you can transform into financial payments or another currency (access to a resource, support from someone, tickets to performance, etc.).[7] The Fairy Purse does not include criteria that acknowledge the support of dependents, a broader reflection on your financial situation, or other forms of traditionally unpaid care labour – elements that could take into account the economic justice perspective that I value from Damien’s above work. There are elements of the Fairy Purse that I think could be helpful in a self-organized collective context, however: for example, the possibility to spread one fee budget over multiple payment moments so that your collective does not need to wait for the end of a project to get paid.
Recently, I was able to participate in a collective experiment with scaled fees with Mothers & Daughters for our 2022 edition of the project. We asked some foundational questions first. For instance, was it possible to get a fee of zero within our experiment? Because there had been some people in the collective who had not been involved in the edition, we decided that, yes, being paid nothing would be possible. Would it be self-nominated, would we demand conversation, or leave open the possibility of questioning someone’s self-nomination? As a collective that works with a horizontal horizon (in other words, with an aim to placing trust and mutual support at its centre), the process would be self-nominated, with the option to have conversation if someone needed support, and no one’s choice about where they positioned themselves on the scale would be questioned. Would the process be anonymous or transparent to the whole collective? Because collective members are the ones who also make payments, it would be impossible to make this process fully anonymous. More importantly, we decided that we would try to make a small move toward addressing the taboo around discussing money, especially within self-organized contexts, by making the process collective. What if someone did not participate? We decided that the participation of everyone was key to making the experiment meaningful and legitimate and that we would support everyone to participate through reminders and a flexible timeline if needed.
We set up an online spreadsheet on our Google Drive with everyone’s names listed. Next to the names were columns numbered from three to zero, with an extra column for notes. Each person in the collective was asked to put an X in a numbered column, with three being the highest fee and zero being no fee. We prompted each other to think about how much of our available labour we contributed to the preparations, build-up, running, pack-down, follow-up, etc. of the project, how big our emotional commitment was, how involved we felt we were, and added an extra suggestion to sit these thoughts next to our own individual financial situation. Finally, there was a time frame for completing the spreadsheet. I think the process raised some questions around financial resources within our collective, and I especially appreciated the reflexivity that came with the process of setting up the parameters of the process, and I hope the differences in the resulting fee distribution were meaningful for people – they were for me. I did understand from some in the collective, and I felt this myself, that being asked to self-nominate a payment level was a stressful process that brought up uncertainties in our abilities to confidently advocate for ourselves and our work, especially when that could involve less money being given to the fees of others.
The experiment was quite a rushed process – Mothers & Daughters has a practice of holding back our collective’s fees until after each project, in case we go over budget and would need to consider distributing the money differently. This is perhaps wise in principle, but it does mean we contribute a lot of time and energy without immediate payment and it produces a big push before the end of the funding term to hustle people to hand in invoices. The rush with our scaled fee experiment also meant that the terms of guidance were quite basic, which could have led to heightened uncertainties in the process of self-nominating. Following Damien’s generous offer to ‘borrow anything that’s useful’ from her ‘guidance’ scaled pricing model,[8] I decided to use this moment to try and transform it into a scaled fee structure using the reflections in this text and the 2022 process with Mothers & Daughters as a starting point (see image 4). I don’t have a set recipe or all the answers for how scaled fees could work, so if you would like to experiment with your collective, I would advise you to adapt and tailor what I have shared here to your own contexts and with the people you work with.
Image 4: By Marnie Slater, 2023
[1] In 2019 Mothers & Daughters was subtitled ‘A Lesbian Bar’. In 2020 we moved to explicitly acknowledge the trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming members of our organizing collective and community, and our expanded practice of what bar-making can be, by changing our subtitle to ‘A Lesbian* and Trans* Bar*’.
[2] Our collective in 2019 included: Alice Versieux, Delphine von Kaatz, Jessica Gysel, Joëlle Sambi Nzeba, Katja Mater, Leïla La Boubou, Marnie Slater, Mia Melvær, Ot Lemmens, Paulien Föllings and Robin Brettar.
[3] For the 2022 report, see: World Economic Forum, ‘Global Gender Gap Report 2022’ (July 13, 2022), https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2022/.
[4] Mothers & Daughters – A Lesbian* and Trans* Bar*, ‘Menu A’ and ‘Menu B’ texts from the 2022 edition.
[5] Hadassah Damien, ‘Sliding Scale: Why, How, and Sorting Out Who,’ Ride Free Fearless Money (May 2016), https://www.ridefreefearlessmoney.com/blog/2016/05/sliding-scale-1/.
[6] Reshape Network Trajectory Fair Governance Models, Christophe Joerin (TRNSTN) and Martin Schick (ed.), ‘The Fairy Purse,’ Reshape Network (23 April 2020), https://reshape.network/article/the-fairy-purse.
[7] Categories include: ‘Positive image/ or recognition outside this job’, ‘Difficulties and stress inside the role’, ‘Eco-responsable [sic] behaviour’, ‘Effective hours (what you consider rather “real” work)’, and ‘Leisure time made possible by doing this job’. Joerin and Schick, ‘The Fairy Purse’.
[8] Damien, ‘Sliding Scale’.